Bacchus over the customs house

FRANK SCHOONMAKER

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DINE.—The American Feinschmecker, the Yankee fine gueule, has in the past few decades permitted himself to learn a considerable amount about food; his ignorance on the subject of wine he has kept inviolate and untarnished. I know of no speedier and surer method of acquiring an undeserved reputation as an unmitigated liar than to recount to one's friends a few of the elementary facts concerning wine—that the vines of Clos Vougeot and Château Margaux have been, for more than half a century, grafted on American roots, that most Champagne is made from red grapes, that France, the greatest wine-producing country in the world, a country in which one person out of every five is supported, in part at least, by the wine industry, cannot produce enough wine for her own needs.

Our friends, it would seem, prefer to believe that Sparkling Burgundy is a distinguished wine (it is merely a sort of sparkling ordinaire) and that via rose is a blend of white wine and red. Unfortunately America has no wine legislation worthy of the name; he who would drink must in some way combine Argus with Bacchus and remember that in most vino there is very little veritas. We might start by observing that Sauternes are extremely sweet dessert wines made in a small and strictly limited district on the Garonne River, and that "Sauternes" from other parts of the world may be good but are certainly not Sauternes. We might note, too, that Burgundy produces less than two-thirds of the wine sold as "Burgundy," that there are only one and a half square miles of vineyards entitled to the name "Chablis," that all of the authentic Chambertin in the world is produced on thirty acres of .ground, and all of the authentic Schloss Johannisberg on twelve.

It is of course possible to lean over backward in all this. There is no point in assuming the all too common attitude of the wine snob, that individual who talks only of the famous Clarets of the 1860's, fragile today and faded as a grandmother's wedding dress, who chatters of comet years and will drink no Champagne bottled since 1911 (when the normal life of a good Champagne is only twenty years). It is highly important to remember that if there are fine wines and old wines, there are also wines pour la soij. As well hear Toscanini seven days a week as drink Château Lafite with every meal. Only . . . when we buy Lafite let us get Toscanini; when we buy ordinary table wine let us pay what Rudy Vallée is worth. On this score of misleading geographical names, it should probably be said that it is against some of the California wines that we shall have to be on our guard. Once the Twenty-first Amendment has become the law of the land, California will begin to produce vast quantities of wine— of ordinary table wine. To expect, of any American vineyard, anything that might be called a vintage wine before 1940 or 1945, would be to expect a large-scale repetition of the miracle of Cana.

Meanwhile . . . quo usque tandem abutere, California. . . ? How long are those of us who have some interest and even some faith in the viticultural future of the United States going to be asked to drink "Margaux" brewed and blended out of grapes which are not related to the famous Cabernet grapes of Bordeaux, and bottled six thousand miles from Margaux? No one with a nose, a palate, and an eye would ever mistake a "Rhine wine" from Napa for a Rhine wine from Hochheim. It is conceivable (though for the present unlikely) that the white wines of Napa will be superior to all but the better Hochheims of all but the better years; at the same time, the two have nothing in common except a long-necked bottle.

PLAIN WINES:THEIR JOY AND BITTERNESS.— There exists a lamentable willingness on the part of Americans to believe that all European wines, or all French wines at least, are good. As a matter of fact, fully fifty per cent of the wine produced in France is perfectly terrible. Of doubtful paternity at best, it comes from the vast and nameless vineyards of the Midi; cut and blended in the wine-sheds of A DIE-HARD TAKES Sète or of Bercy in Paris (whence the derisive appellation, "Château de Bercy") it is rated according to alcoholic content, sold for a couple of francs a bottle, and quite properly diluted with water before being drunk. It is harsh, rough, insufficiently aged, and it has something of the sinister metallic color of an aniline dye.

A good ordinaire (and despite everything there are many of these) is on the other hand a thing which no connoisseur would disdain, a thing which bears, to the great Burgundies and the great Clarets, much the same relationship that a song by Schumann bears to the Seventh Symphony. It is young, with that certain flowery freshness, that verdant fruitiness which a good young wine possesses; at the same time it is a finished product which will not improve with age. It is invariably dry, for cheap sweet wines are never good and an "inexpensive Sauternes" is a grocer's hallucination. Such wine in France (where agricultural products are at least as high as in the United States) costs, provided one knows what to ask for, twenty-five or thirty cents a quart; in Spain, where bottled wine is literally cheaper than bottled water, it can often he bought for ten. There is no earthly reason why the wine-growers of California should not put on the market wines quite comparable to the better Beaujolais, to those delightful lesser growths (crus bourgeois) of Bordeaux, to the Riojas of Spain, or to the excellent red wine of Chinon, so dear to Rabelais, at forty cents a bottle or less.

These gracious little ordinaires, the peasant girls of wine, were very possibly created by a wise deity for the express purpose of confounding the sophisticate and the pedant. They have no place and deserve none in the lordly and venerable cellars of Larue or Foyot; put them in the company of the cuisine paysanne or cuisine bourgeoise of the province from which they come, and they are utterly charming. Even at home they are likely to terrify learned doctors by their lack of table manners; they seem never to have heard of the color line. The lusty gourmets of Chinon drink the red wine of Chinon with fish as well as fowl, and I have seen wine merchants in the Haute Savoie put down white Sevssel with cheese.

POPPING CORK AND SMOKING BOTTLE.— It may at first seem a far cry from an unpretentious little table wine at forty cents a quart to a famous Champagne at four dollars; hut Champagne shares with ordinaire one important and unique distinction—it can he, logically and correctly, drunk from the beginning of a well-planned meal straight through to the end. Served at cocktail time it is perhaps the soundest of all aperitifs; it has a distinct affinity for oysters, walks hand in hand with fish, strikes up an immediate friendship with virtually any entrée, and no less an authority than George Saintsbury has recommended that one drink it with game. Only the salads, traditional and inveterate enemies of the grape, seem unable to establish with it am sort of entente cordiale.

Champagne has suffered of recent years so general a vulgarization and so extensive an imitation that people as a whole have tended to forget that it is, essentially, not the life of the party, but a wine. Actually it is one of the four or five greatest of wines, hearing no more relation to the inferior "bubblies" that follow in its path than it bears to ginger ale. It is highly important to remember that a true Champagne smokes, hut does not erupt, when opened, that it should he served in deep trumpet-shaped glasses, that it has, if genuine, the unmistakable gout du terroir the dry, faintly alkaline taste of the chalk soil upon which it is grown. It is also important to remember that Champagne (a n d the less deadly of its imitations as well) is sparkling, not because it has been carbonated, hut because, through the addition of minute quantities of rockcandy syrup, a secondary fermentation has been produced in an already fermented wine.

Considered as a wine, Champagne stands, to a far greater degree than Burgundy, Rhine, or Claret, in a class by itself. It is the only sparkling wine that deserves from the connoisseur any real respect; it is the only great wine that can he drunk throughout a complete meal; it is, lastly, the only major wine in the selection of which other considerations outweigh that of vintage years. Better an undated brut of a great house (Lanson, Krug, Roederer, RerrierJouet, to mention hut four of twenty-odd) than a demisec 1926 put out by someone who has remained, for good and sufficient reasons, unknown. As a whole, although there are to this rule, as to all others, certain exceptions, the bruts, driest of Champagnes, are the best. Champagne is by nature a dry wine, and the taste of rockcandy syrup can he used to cover a multitude of sins.

THE ARITHMETIC OF VINTAGES.—For some obscure reason, the general public is pleased to regard the extreme care with which the wine-lover chooses his vintage years as so much absurd tomfoolery. The wines of Château Lafite rank, year in and year out, as perhaps the most expensive of all the Clarets: in 1915 the entire production of the Lafite vineyards was declared unworthy to hear the label of the Château, and was sold as ordinaire for a few cents a bottle. In the fall of 1929 (greatest of all wine years since the war) the wines grown on the vineyards belonging to the Hospices de Beaune, in Burgundy, were sold at auction and brought 1.888.000 francs; in 1931 the wines produced by the same vineyards, similarly sold, brought 215.000 francs. This was in no way due to the depression, for between 1929 and 1931 prices as a whole continued to rise sharply in France. To buy wines, or to order wines in a restaurant, without knowing that '19, '21, '23, '26, '28, and '29 are the outstanding post-war years in Burgundy, and '20, '21, '24, '28. and '29 the great recent years in Bordeaux, would be about as intelligent as attempting rifle practice in an unlighted cellar.

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CLARETS AND THEIR SISTERS.—Of all the questions, the mere propounding of which is sufficient to demonstrate a profound ignorance of wine, perhaps the most objectionable is that one hears so often these days on this side of the Atlantic—"which do you like, Bordeaux or Burgundy?" As well ask a person whether he likes chicken or roast beef. 1 have never known anyone who had a sound appreciation of Burgundy who did not like Claret. Unfortunately it is, however, possible for one who buys wine to say that he prefers Bordeaux, for in buying red Bordeaux and, to a lesser extent, Sauternes as well, there are certain guarantees of authenticity; when one buys Burgundy it is largely a case of caveat emptor.

Despite the fact that Doctor Johnson called Claret "a drink for boys," the less hardy gourmets of a less rollicking day are inclined to rank it. as wine, considerably ahead of Doctor Johnson's beloved Port. A great Claret of a great year is very possibly the greatest wine in the world. Laid reverently in a good cellar it will keep for the better part of half a century. It develops, from the age of seven or eight onward, a silky beauty of texture, a deep red-brown color (the French call it "pelure d'oignon," or "onion-skin"), great depth of bouquet.

The Sauternes, gracious white sisters to the Clarets, have suffered, more perhaps than any other wines, from a superfluity of illegitimate namesakes. THE KING OF WINES—One who would come face to face, in France, with a white wine greater than the greatest Sauternes, must go to Burgundy, which produces the "divin Montrachet."

To a person who has seen the wide rolling vineyards of the Bordeaux country, the vineyards of Burgundy, stretching off to the west of the main railway line from Paris to the Riviera, must seem extraordinarily limited in extent. Actually they are so limited that the demand for fine Burgundies annually exceeds the supply by almost fifty per cent. It is too had that some of our distinguished law makers, who are already crying that France will "flood the American market with its wines", cannot be shown that the whole Cote d'Or. that celebrated "golden hillside" which produces all the great wines of Burgundy, is only a single hillside, thirty miles long and less than a mile wide.

WINES FOR THE NIBELUNGEN.—If the Burgundy vineyards are amazingly small, those of the Rhineland are heartbreakingly so. That there should exist, in the world, only a few hundred acres capable of yielding what is unquestionably one of the three greatest white wines in the world, might almost he construed as a statement by the deity in favor of temperance. Germany produces, at present, approximately two bottles of wine per year for every man, woman, and child in the Reich; it produces, as a matter of fact, hardly more wine than Switzerland. This being the case, it is by no means surprising that the few great Rhine wines should bring, even today, astonishingly high prices in Europe; it is virtually certain that a wine such as Liebfrauenstift (the term "Liebfraumilch" means nothing whatsoever) will cost, in America after Repeal, at least as much as the most expensive Champagne. But for such wine it is impossible to quote any precise value in dollars and cents; such wines are worth whatever one pays, and one is lucky to get them at any price.

No one who has lived, or who has even spent, a few brief days in Paris, can very well fail to he familiar with the house of Nicolas—the myriad branches of this vast wine company are to he found on almost ei 'rv Paris street, and its extremely amusing posters occupy a place of honor on virtually every billboard. Nicolas lists, in his special catalog, a certain number of very special bottles—octogenarian Clarets dating from the days of The Commune, Burgundies such as the Due de Morny drank, Hermitages brown with the lusty autumn of their fifty years. These bottles are sold (by a chain store, mind you) only to such persons as are able to furnish "certain guarantees" of the fact that they intend to open, to serve, and to drink the wines in a fitting manner.

It seems rather too had that some such condition cannot he attached to all those princely and venerable bottles that will presently begin to make their way westward across the Atlantic. Only those, for example, should be allowed to purchase Chamberlin who realize that all wines (save Rhine wines) should be served in large, stemmed, white, tulip-shaped glasses, and that a wine glass should never he filled more than half full. Only those should receive a license to buy Clarets who know that red wines other than ordinaires should always be served at the temperature of the dining-room. Only those should he accorded permission to acquire Rhine wines who know that fine still white wines should he chilled hut never iced. To such bottles as have the misfortune to fall into barbarian hands, let us express in advance our profound regrets. Perhaps, even in barbarian hands, they may serve a purpose. For it is certain that more welcome ambassadors of civilization never crossed the sea.